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All cultures around the world manifest some form of conceptual organization dealing with chronological experience. Although the anthropology of time is a research field with a long history (e.g., Gell, 1992; Munn, 1992), a linguistic anthropology of time is less developed than one might expect (Levinson, 2004). In recent years, cognitive linguists and psychologists have started making theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of how humans construe temporal concepts (e.g., Boroditski, 2000; Evans, 2004; Gentner, 2001; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Moore, 2000; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; Shinohara, 1999; Talmy, 2000; Zinken, in press). Much research has focussed on spatial construals of time (e.g., the use of an ego-centric front-back axis to conceptualize ideas such as future and past). How exactly spatial entities and experiences might be recruited for structuring temporal construals, and what variations and invariants exist, are open questions that require more scientific investigation.

The theme session aims to further consolidate this relatively new research field, and present the state of the art to the cognitive linguistic community. Presentations are invited reporting empirical findings from cross-linguistic research, ethnographic observations, gesture studies, and experimental investigations. Special emphasis will be put on the discussion of methodological issues and theoretical questions regarding the nature of the relationship between spatial and temporal conceptualisation and linguistic expression.

The 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society will be held May 3-5, 2007 at the University of Chicago. This year's conference will include a main session, focusing on the issue of gradience in grammar, and three parasessions described below.

Main Session: Gradience in Grammar

This year, the Main Session will focus on the issue of gradience in grammar, and consider the implications of gradience for linguistic theory more generally. Some of the myriad issues involved include:

- the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality; - the status of the grammatical component as a distinct cognitive system; - the tension between observed gradience as a property of the grammar versus a reflection of speaker variation; - the range of empirical evidence that bears on these issues.

While we especially encourage submissions touching on the topic of gradience, equal consideration will be give to papers from all major linguistic subfields and frameworks, as well as from related cross-disciplinary areas, regardless of focus.

This parasession will focus on the syntactic properties of so-called wh-structures, such as questions, topicalization, clefts, relative clauses, and other types of (unbounded) dependencies. Submissions from all theoretical and empirical perspectives are encouraged.

Invited Speaker:

Jim McCloskey - University of California, Santa Cruz

Parasession: Gaps, exceptions, and paradigm defectiveness

Papers in this parasession will explore the nature of gaps and exceptions in phonology and morphology and the range of motivations that can account for defective behavior.

Invited Speaker:

Kie Zuraw - University of California, Los Angeles

Presentation Format:

Each talk will be given 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Presented papers will be published in the CLS Proceedings.

Submission Guidelines:

Anyone may submit one abstract as the sole author and a second as co-author, or two as co-author. All abstracts must be submitted online at http://clml.uchicago.edu/cls43. Abstracts should conform to the following specifications:

- PDF format, with filename ''Lastname - Paper Title'' (e.g., Patel - On Halkomelem Morphophonemics.pdf) - 12-point font, 1-inch margins - Title and keywords (i.e., CLS session title, language, language family, linguistics subfield) - Abstract should be no more than 500 words in length. Data, keywords, and references are not included in the final count, but please interleave data with the main body of the abstract if possible. Total abstract (including data and references) should not exceed 2 pages. - Author name(s) should not appear on abstract!

Please note that abstracts submitted to CLS 43 will be evaluated under a two-tiered review system involving both external and internal reviewers.

Deadline:

All abstracts must be submitted by 8pm CST on Friday, December 15, 2006. The authors will be notified of acceptance decisions by mid-February 2007.

For questions not answered in this call, please contact us at cls43 at uchicago dot edu.